Blog: "Someone Should Have Taught Me This..."
Essential guides, techniques, and psychology principles for building a kick-ass marketing operation
Do We Become Smarter? – Incremental vs Entity Theory of Intelligence
Incremental Vs Entity Theory I'd like to introduce what is probably the most important concept I've ever learned: the entity theory of intelligence. In a way, I'm frustrated that I didn't latch onto this insight until I was 35 years old, but by the same token, I'm...
Self-Deception, with Dr. Cortney Warren
The Eagan High School class of '96 has produced its share of accomplished and articulate alumni, one pride-inspiring example of which is Dr. Cortney Warren. Warren is a clinical psychologist and researcher in the field of eating disorders and body image. She has...
Understanding and Increasing Willpower
So There's a Way To ACTUALLY Increase Willpower? There is a growing community of psychologists and neurologists who are shedding new light on the concept of willpower. If you're interested in the topic, a great place to start is a book by Dr. Roy Baumeister, a leader...
How to Know Your Customer’s Mind Before They Do
A couple of months ago I was at an American Marketing Association event on predictive marketing analytics. One of the sponsors was demonstrating the powerful capabilities of their prediction software in a rather creative way: the set up a fortune-telling booth. I gave...
Should I Be Doing This? – Unraveling Passion, Talent and Practice
I show you three groups of recent college graduates. The first group has been identified as intrinsically talented at a certain discipline. The second group identifies themselves as very passionate about a certain discipline. The third group engages in tough,...
Was “Black Thursday” a Stupid, Stupid Idea?
This year many major retailers, spurred by competition and disappointing sales, decided to start their usual Black Friday deals a day early. Their reasoning was twofold: 1) an earlier start would help them get a jump on any competitors who waited until Friday morning...
Consumer Choice as Self-expression
This month we travel all the way to Bremen, Germany to look at a fascinating doctoral dissertation published in this month's Psychology & Marketing. Michail Kokkoris, a newly-minted PhD in psychology, brings us insight into the nature of individual choice and how...
A Happy Life or a Meaningful Life?
A majority of people generally say they want a happy life. A majority of people also say they want to become parents at some point. The trouble is, according to nearly every study ever performed on the matter, becoming a parent reduces happiness and marital...
Does Advertising Content Work? Let’s Find Out…
One of the great advances in economics to emerge in recent decades is the field of behavioral economics. The preceding generation of economists, including Milton Friedman and others, believed that humans were entirely rational consumers. When they made a purchase...
Too Much Choice: The Jam Experiment
Are we really hampered by too much choice? We take a look at one of the most famous studies in consumer psychology: The Jam Experiment.
Think Acting Is About Emotional Empathy? Science Says No.
David Gergen was a staffer to four presidents: Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. In his book Eyewitness to Power, he said of Reagan that his previous acting experience gave him a coveted public speaking skill: controlled access to one's own emotions. Acting is...
The Cutting Edge: 5 New Psychological Discoveries
Hot off the presses this week: 1) Jealousy Makes Us View Ourselves as More Like Our Rivals Three new studies by Erica Slotter of Villanova University (and her colleagues) came out today in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. We already know that the way we...
Quora Questions: Overcoming Procrastination
While trolling through Quora, I came across a question that I have asked myself over and over: "How do I get over my bad habit of procrastinating?" The first answer to this question caught my eye. It was written by Oliver Emberton, who keeps a blog called Leading a...
Just How Squishy is Social Science?
I find psychology and sociology generally fascinating, and part of that fascination extends to just how full of holes these fields are. I believe that one of the largest parts about understanding any area of knowledge is to understand the limits of that area. Just...
Plato’s Psychology
Plato and Moral Psychology Plato (427-334 BC) recorded perhaps the oldest surviving model of moral psychology in the western tradition. His ideas appear in his Dialogues, and we will concentrate mostly on The Republic. While his ideas on man's moral motivations have...
Statistics, Damn Statistics, and Lies: The Deceptive “Certainty” of Analytics
The hottest buzzword of the decade is "analytics" - the ability to gain heretofore unattainable intelligence and insight by mining piles of data. As with the Internet in the 90's, what was once the sole domain of geekdom is becoming mainstream. Whereas once we...
The Social Animal
Recently, I read David Brooks's The Social Animal, an interesting survey of the best current research on psychology, sociology and culture. Though a best-seller, this book received some mixed critical reviews when it came out in 2011. Knowing Brooks to be a strong...
Blink and You’ll Miss It: Intuitive Thought, Decision and Action
A Student of Intuitive Thought David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times, and (in my opinion) an acute social and political observer. He is not an academic, but is very well read in psychology and sociology. He wrote a book in 2011 called The Social Animal...
Me For a Member: Cognitive Dissonance and Rationalization
"I would never belong to any club that would have me for a member." --Groucho Marx A group of mediocre, boring people get together and decide that they want to form a club that features strong barriers to entry; very few other people can get in without a rigorous...
The Personal Myth
"It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble, it’s the things we do know that just ain’t so." --Mark Twain One very interesting dimension to personality has to do with the stories that we tell ourselves. Research has increasingly revealed that...